Keir Starmer must find ‘more inclusive way’ to run Labour, says Andy Burnham
Andy Burnham gave Sir Keir Starmer a lukewarm endorsement on Tuesday, urging the Prime Minister to lead a stronger and more united government amid continued questions about his leadership.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester called for stability, but argued that this could only be secured through “a more inclusive way of running the party”.
“We need to get a stronger sense of being a team than there has been in recent times,” he said at an event hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a think tank.
“We need to dial down all of this constant briefing. It’s seemingly a bit endless, some of the anonymous briefing that’s going round. I think we just need to focus on what’s in front of us,” he said.
Burnham’s intervention comes after a dramatic few days in Westminster, which have seen disagreements within the government break out into the open.
Burnham denies leadership challenge speculation
Starmer faced calls to resign yesterday from Anas Sarwar, Labour’s Scottish leader. “The situation in Downing Street is not good enough, there have been too many mistakes,” he said.
Sarwar reportedly spoke to health minister Wes Streeting over the weekend, while Streeting himself then published text exchanges with Peter Mandelson on Monday in an attempt to show the pair did not have a close relationship – a potential obstacle to Streeting’s leadership ambitions.
One left-wing Labour MP told the Telegraph that the entire affair had been “so clearly manipulated and co-ordinated by the Streeting campaign”, but the plan backfired after members of the Cabinet rallied round Starmer.
Burnham, who is widely thought to harbour leadership ambitions of his own, was blocked by Starmer from standing in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election last month.
However, Burnham argued that he was not standing in the election to launch a leadership challenge. “I think we’ve got to get away from the sense that everything is a challenge,” he said.
He urged the government to focus more on what it had acheived, suggesting that Starmer had “drawn a line” under a previous era of economic governance.
“I think they have broken with the governments I was in that didn’t allow people to re-regulate buses, that didn’t renationalise the railways, that didn’t have as ambitious plans around housing,” he said.
Burnham said the UK faced “a generational moment,” partly as a result of recent revelations about Mandelson’s relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein.
“Following recent events, I think the time has come to call an end to this era in British politics when politicians got too close to wealth, too seduced by the notion that deregulated markets would provide the solution,” he said.
“I do feel we’re at a crucial moment, it is absolutely right that people give the government stability in this moment.”